Website shares user credit cards with world+dog

A website that encourages people to share details of their online purchases with world+dog was caught exposing the complete credit card numbers of four of its users.

Blippy is one of the more glaring examples of the ill-conceived social exhibitionist craze sweeping the web. On Friday, its users got a taste of that fad's dark side when simple Google searches turned up 127 transactions that included the credit card numbers.

Blippy quickly apologized for the snafu and said it resulted from glitch that dated back to the website's beta testing. User profiles are supposed to be scrubbed of the corresponding credit card details so they show only the merchant and the dollar amount spent. But during testing, some of that information remained in the HTML code and was only discovered using Google.

Google said it removed the card numbers from searches a little more than two hours after it learned of the problem. Blippy officials were in the process of reaching the four individuals whose numbers were exposed. ®